Bethesda pencils in new Elder Scrolls title for 2010 on GamesIndustry.biz
has a quote from Paul Oughton of Bethesda Softworks, who answers a question
about Wii development by volunteering information about the next installment
The Elder Scrolls RPG series, saying it will potentially released in 2010:
"At the moment we've got Fallout 3 for this year and potentially there's a new
Elder Scrolls title in 2010. At the moment we're not that interested in the Wii.
We're going to stick to PS3, Xbox 360 and PC. We'll continue to pursue three or
four titles a year and go for big titles."

Oblivion was half baked, that for sure. And I can't help going into it at least a little bit.

To be fair to Oblivion, it took me about 100 hours of play to get really mad at the shortcuts Bethesda took in terms of it's game design.

But it took me about 1000 hours to get bored with Morrowind, in my opinion the far better designed game in terms of balance. Everything was more "hand crafted", even the mindless bandits that would attack you had their own names. The guys that made Morrowind just seemed to care more about the game and who ever was playing it. Morrowind had history. Oblivion was just random, which worked for Diablo, but Oblivion failed to reward you for your work, which is what the game became. Out of the box at least.

Oblivion failed to appreciate that an items value is determined by it's scarcity, and had every NPC leveling up with the same equipment you had. It was a joke. Out of the box at least.

I think this was one of the earliest issues that modders tried to fix, a truly monumental task. To make it more like Morrowind.

I cant believe some of you people. Complaining about character animations and jerky graphics. Jesus Christ on Jupiter! What the fuck?

And the same thing now with Fallout 3. Whatever happened with Gameplay > Graphics???!!! Fucking shit, Morrowind, Oblivion (with some mods) and Fallout 3 now, all have great and varied gameplay. These are RPGs for Christ's sake! If you want Graphics go play Crysis or something equaly dumb.

Bad? I've heard lots of people talk about how bad Mass Effect is for conversations and dialogue. How bad is Fallout? Pretty much only one choice?

I think he was talking about presentation rather than dialog. Mass Effect had a very cinematic conversation system and the facial animations, lip-sync and body language were great. The only problem is that the abbreviated, morally-separated dialog circle was crap and in most cases, your choices were limited to nice/apathetic/jackass.

What Bethesda needs to do is get the Crysis engine and stop making their own engines. Bethesda spends way too much time on their own engines on every ES game. Its a big waste of time. They could also hire the Stalker team for animations and A.I.!

Fuck yahCheck out this Medieval custom map for Crysis. I thought "TES V" as soon as I saw it. Jesus Christ what a cool game it would be if it used Cryengine 2.

All the Elder Scrolls games suck ass due to their incredibly shallow and repetitive nature and scope. I give the ES series art department the highest regards, the lore is cool if not contrived, but their game engines have been a huge mixed bag. Really poor animations and the main character always looks like he is floating over the ground.

Oblivion, and Fallout 3, have this plastic mold shiny look that reminds me of Doom 3.

What Bethesda needs to do is get the Crysis engine and stop making their own engines. Bethesda spends way too much time on their own engines on every ES game. Its a big waste of time. They could also hire the Stalker team for animations and A.I.!

I'm living in a dream world. With the consoles poised to take over, its all about the $. But I am surprised at how good Fallout 3 is! The missions are a blast and the dialogue nice. The conversations are so bad though coming off of Mass Effect.

I loved Oblivion. It was not without faults but out-of-the-box, without modifications or patches, I had a great time with it. I put in maybe 50-60hrs on my first run through and around 100hrs for my second, which is far more than any other game (minus multiplayer games like Team Fortress 2). I didn't like the scaling difficult level, the RPG elements could have been better and sword fighting was pretty basic but those things didn't prevent me from enjoying the game hugely. With Fallout 3 making it to Steam I'm hoping Oblivion will make it to, as I wouldn't mind picking up the GOTY edition.

I also liked the modding capabilities and did make use of some of them on my second run through, though only for cosmetic changes (increased map size, reduced inventory size, textures). There's no way they can appeal to everyone out-of-the-box but mods go a long way.

I very much look forward to TESV, though have to say that Fallout 3 doesn't appeal to me - I despise the 3rd person animations and, while the world looks quite sharp, the animations look worse than that of Oblivion. I know someone that is getting it so I'll have a gander but watching videos is usually all I need to know - I knew that Clear Sky looked appealed to me despite the terribly negative reviews, for instance. On the otherhand I knew that Oblivion was my sort of game from the get-go.

I still enjoy Oblivion, and I'm not going to go into how useless out of the box it is, almost annoyingly so

Oblivion was half baked, that for sure. And I can't help going into it at least a little bit.

To be fair to Oblivion, it took me about 100 hours of play to get really mad at the shortcuts Bethesda took in terms of it's game design.

But it took me about 1000 hours to get bored with Morrowind, in my opinion the far better designed game in terms of balance. Everything was more "hand crafted", even the mindless bandits that would attack you had their own names. The guys that made Morrowind just seemed to care more about the game and who ever was playing it. Morrowind had history. Oblivion was just random, which worked for Diablo, but Oblivion failed to reward you for your work, which is what the game became. Out of the box at least.

Oblivion failed to appreciate that an items value is determined by it's scarcity, and had every NPC leveling up with the same equipment you had. It was a joke. Out of the box at least.

I think this was one of the earliest issues that modders tried to fix, a truly monumental task. To make it more like Morrowind.

@Bluesfanboi: what do those 2 variables do exactly? Sounds interesting...

As for the animations, I played through Oblivion 3 times because there's so much to do and in that respect I was able to ignore the animations, which are passable, but pretty horrid compared to most games these days.

Oh how sweet it would be to have Oblivion using the Euphoria engine for NPCs...

I still enjoy Oblivion, and I'm not going to go into how useless out of the box it is, almost annoyingly so. And only after 100 mods have done their thing (bless you Horse Whisperer Ring, glory to you Illumination Within, tip-o-the-hat to Qarl's Textures) do you have the game you wanted. Three years and running, initial installation, not bad.

But you mentioned the inferior physics of the players' movement, it not being smooth or the animations unacceptable. Thinking about that and the hundreds of game hours watching my actors do jumps and swim and ride horses and fight with different weapons using different techniques and different interactions, I would have to say on the whole they are adequate and maybe more varied than you are giving them credit for.

Also, I might have modded all the bad parts out leaving a better physics/animation system...thus further proving your point. which you do have, compared to rudimentary FPS engines, the Gamebryo engine is a step backwards. Of course Havok has its charms, but it doesn't help every circumstance.

Did you realize you could enable Havok for facial expressions and other hidden things: bActorLookWithHavok=1

How about this strange Havok twist: bAllowHavokGrabTheLiving=1

You can also increase the number of threads Havok uses on your multi-core CPU.

All that means is that there is potential for more interesting and dynamic visuals and interactions in Oblivion, it's not god-awful by any means but some choices leave you scratching your head : non-deformable terrain, LOD texture bias from hell, no arial travel.

Looking forward to it. I liked TES: Oblivion, I just hope #5 doesn't have the same piss-poor animations for everything. Bad animations can really ruin the atmosphere of a game.

Totally agree. Fallout 3 has the same issues too. I hope Bethesda either dumps their modified Gamebryo engine or codes a new animation system, because the one they have now sucks. In fact, they need a better "player movement" system too. Mouse and keyboard controls on the PC (while better than the console), sucks.

It never feels smooth.

Makes you wonder what the heck those guys are going over there. You'd think they get the controls down first.